Yerko Rojas

Evictions and suicide: a follow-up study of almost 22 000 Swedish households in the wake of the global financial crisis

Background Millions of families across the world are evicted every year. However, very little is known about the impact that eviction has on their lives. This lack of knowledge is also starting to be noticed within the suicidological literature, and prominent scholars are arguing that there is an urgent need to explore the extent to which suicides may be considered a plausible consequence of being faced with eviction. Method The present studys sample consists of all persons served with an application for execution of an eviction order during 2009–2012. This group is compared to a random 10% sample of the general Swedish population, ages 16 years and over. The analysis is based on penalised maximum likelihood logistic regressions. Results Those who had lost their legal right to their dwellings and for whom the landlord had applied for the eviction to be executed were approximately four times more likely to commit suicide than those who had not been exposed to this experience (OR=4.42), controlling for several demographic, socioeconomic and mental health conditions prior to the date of the judicial decision. Conclusions Home evictions have a significant and detrimental impact on individuals’ risk of committing suicide, even when several other well-known suicidogenic risk factors are controlled for. Our results reinforce the importance of ongoing attempts to remove the issue of evictions from its status as a hidden and neglected social problem.

Rethinking the Long-Term Consequences of Growing Up in a Disadvantaged Neighbourhood: Lessons from Sweden

Using extensive longitudinal register data for more than 80 000 young metropolitan Swedes, this study addresses the effect of a disadvantaged neighbourhood social context on groupings of outcomes that are important for the living conditions of young adults. The overall results show that growing up in a disadvantaged neighbourhood increases the risk of experiencing comparably more unemployment, having less education and receiving more social assistance than similar young people from more affluent neighbourhoods. However, when the estimated effects of neighbourhood are assessed by means of an epidemiological impact measure that takes the prevalence of the risk factor at population level into account; these effects prove to be minimal. We discuss possible drawbacks of placing too much emphasis on policies targeting disadvantaged neighbourhoods versus universal social policy measures.

Too poor to binge? An examination of economic hardship and its relation to alcohol consumption patterns in Taganrog, Russia

Too poor to binge? : An examination of economic hardship and its relation to alcohol consumption patterns in Taganrog, Russia

Self-directed and interpersonal male violence in adolescence and young adulthood: a 30-year follow up of a Stockholm cohort.

In line with Wilkinsons theory on inequality and health, this study simultaneously analyses self-directed and interpersonal violence among men in a Stockholm birth cohort born in 1953 with respect to their early life experiences of stress, their lack of social connectedness and their relative deprivation. Multinomial logistic regressions with cluster-robust variance estimates were used. Self-directed violence was found to be related to self-rated loneliness and non-membership of voluntary associations but not to a lack of friendship in school at the age of 12-13, while the opposite was shown to be true for interpersonal violence. Growing up in a family that received means-tested social assistance at least once during the period 1953-1965 was taken as an objective indicator of relative deprivation and proved to be correlated with both self-directed and interpersonal violence. Disadvantaged social comparison at the age of 12-13, taken as a subjective indicator of relative deprivation, was only statistically related to a subsequent risk of interpersonal violence. It is suggested that different types of social connectedness and relative deprivation, respectively, explain these different patterns of violence. Furthermore, the study speculates on the possibility of frequent social comparison itself being a factor to consider when trying understanding violence in general.

School performance and gender differences in suicidal behaviour--a 30-year follow-up of a Stockholm cohort born in 1953

Astonishingly little is known about the relationship between high educational achievements and suicidal behaviour among women. This is remarkable given that a woman breaking into traditionally male-dominant spheres is a well established example of social-role marginality. The current study combines fatal and non-fatal suicidal behaviour and analyses, by means of logistic regression, the degree to which high school performance during pre-adolescence in the mid-1960s, in Sweden, had a detrimental effect on suicidal behaviour for women, as opposed to men, in adolescence and young adulthood. The Stockholm birth cohort study was used for this purpose. The results show that girls with both above and below average marks had an elevated risk of engaging in suicidal behaviour. However, this relation only held for girls who had grown up with supportive parental ambitions in terms of educational commitment. For boys, only low school performance was shown to be suicidogenic, irrespective of parental ambitions.